The Enlightenment tradition in political philosophy is characterized by a twin commitment to grounding political theory in science and to individual freedom realized through natural (later civil) rights, displacing appeals to tradition, revelation, or natural law alone. Early Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke held a "workmanship ideal" of knowledge and legitimacy — the notion that maker's knowledge and maker's ownership derive from the act of creation (originally a theological claim, since God has perfect knowledge of and ownership over what he made) — which grounds both epistemic certainty about human-constructed systems (geometry, civil philosophy) and normative claims about property, self-ownership, and individual rights that underlie the social contract tradition.
The Enlightenment tradition in political philosophy is characterized by a twin commitment to grounding political theory in science and to individual freedom realized through natural (later civil) rig…